Free Thought
drorzel | October 6, 2006As threatened in the previous post on new "quantum teleportation" results, here's the first of three old articles on teleportation. This one discusses EPR states and "entanglement." It's somewhat linkrotted-- in particular, the original news article is gone, but the explanation is still ok.
This dates from July of 2002, which is like 1840 in blog years.
Yet again, SciTech Daily provides me with weblog material, this time in the form of an oddball article in the Las Vegas City Life archives (how do they find this stuff? It never would've occurred to me to look there...). The article is mostly…
goodmath | October 5, 2006A few months ago, I wrote about the Poincare conjecture, and the fact that it appeared to finally have been solved by a reclusive russian mathematician named Grisha Perelman. Now there's news that *another* classic problem may have been solved. This time, it's the Navier-Stokes equation, apparently solved by [Professor Penny Smith](http://comet.lehman.cuny.edu/sormani/others/smith.html) of Lehigh University. She's published the steps leading up to her solution in top peer-reviewed journals, and a [preprint of the final paper is now available via arxiv](http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0609740).…
jfiore | October 4, 2006As an electrical engineer and college professor, I often have to correct my students' use of the words ironic and optimize. Lots of people use ironic when they're referring to what might be better called a curious or interesting coincidence. No, it's not ironic that Larry died on his father's birthday. Irony involves something producing a result the exact opposite of what was expected. Meanwhile, many people use optimize as a synonym for efficient or best. To an engineer, to optimize something means to trade off performance in areas deemed unimportant in order to improve performance elsewhere…
goodmath | September 28, 2006To do a square root on an abacus, you use partitions to do a paper algorithm for square root using the abacus. The catch is that most people don't even *remember* how to do square roots on paper, if they ever learned it at all. (In fact, in school, *I* didn't learn the classical paper algorithm; we never really did roots on paper; the closest we did was using square root as an example of Newton's method. Like so much of my basic math, I learned this from my father.)
So, for your entertainment and edification, today, I'll describe the classical algorithm for computing square roots on paper. I…
catdynamics | September 27, 2006Via NASAwatch - NASA administrator Griffin replies to the American Astronomical Societies' Six Questions On NASA Priorities and Processes
Read it.
Interesting, tempered, with interesting conceptual holes.
1) the "mission balance" is not just different size missions, it is also different sub-fields.
If there is any desire for a long term broad space science program, then there needs to be a balance between sub-fields, not just mission classes.
2) there is serious disconnect on the "workforce crisis".
There is a very frustrating "MBA mentality" which seems to think that science expertise is…
catdynamics | September 27, 2006The 2006 Nobel Laureates will be announced on Monday, October 2. Any early guesses as to who this year's honorees will be?...
No.
To be precise, on monday the boring old medicine prize will be announced. Things don't really get exciting until tuesday... and the process doesn't finish until oct 13.
The Academy learned a long time ago what NASA knows well, you need to spread things around the news cycle. Except the Norwegians, who clearly don't understand yet that you never make a big announcement on fridays - don't they realise journalists have lives!
Serious guesses?
No idea about Medicine…
drorzel | September 26, 2006Dave Bacon explains heating-induced decoherence:
One problem with ion traps qubits has been the heating of the motional degrees of the trapped ions, due mostly to fluctuating potentials on the trap electrodes. The electrode potential goes yee-yaw and the ion goes wee-wah, heating up and thus ruining the motional degree of freedom of the ion.
See, this is why he gets to be Pontiff, and I'm a cardinal at best...
The highly technical use of "yee-yaw" and "wee-wah" is in order to introduce a new paper from Chris Monroe's group in Michigan, who have found that cooling the trap electrodes greatly…
sporte | September 25, 2006Like computers? Like biology? Want to find a way to combine the two worlds?
Bio::Blogs, a carnival at the intersection of biology, computing, and math, will be hosted here October 1st.
For those of you who are wondering what this all means, it means that on Sunday, I will post a collection of links to interesting stories that are somehow related to biology, computers, or math, or various blends thereof. That means I might include stories about computer science, software engineering, genomics, bioinformatics, and whatever strikes me as interesting when I sit down Saturday night, put on…
j7uy5 | September 20, 2006I'll be curious to see if there turns out to be a parallel between what
is happening now in the auto industry, and what happens in the future
in the computing industry.
We recently passed the 25th anniversary of the original IBM PC (
href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_intro.html">model
5150). Ever since then, computer marketing has been
oriented toward progressively faster, more capable machines.
Original IBM PC
photo from IBM archive
But now, we hear that
rel="tag">Intel is
href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/11/37NNintellayoffs_1.html">…
goodmath | September 19, 2006If you want to talk about mechanical computing tools, you can't ignore the abacus. It's the oldest computing tool in the world; and it's still very commonly used. It's also about as different from the slide rule as you could imagine. The abacus is really fundamentally an addition device; the slide-rule is fundamentally a multiplier. And the slide rule is very complicated - all those different scales, in logarithmic relationships; the abacus is thoroughly simple - just beads hanging on wires. But don't let that fool you: the abacus is is a remarkable device, which is capable of a really huge…
razib | September 14, 2006PLOS has an interesting article which reports on the differentiation of European populations into northern and southern clusters, along with separability between various nationalities. Since until recently mate selection has been a function of distance and topography, and national borders also tended to be bounded by physical features (e.g., the Alps or the Pyrenees), it is no surprise that, on average, the French tend to cluster with other French. But, I do think quantification such as this is useful:
...most individual participants with southern European ancestry (Italian, Spanish,…
drorzel | September 14, 2006The current crop of String Theory Backlash books has a lot of people wondering about what will replace string theory as the top fad in theoretical physics. Other people (well, ok, me) are worried about a more important question: What will replace string theory as the most over-hyped area in theoretical physics?
Dave Bacon selflessly offers up his own field of quantum information, noting that Lee Smolin praises quantum computing theorists as "young" and "smart." As Dave notes, this is the physics equivalent of "hip" or "hot" in more general pop culture.
And Scott Aaronson offers further…
tfk | September 14, 2006A few years back, the University of Chicago hosted a great event. Students organized several day of panels and discussions, with luminaries in many fields coming to discuss the issues of the day. On a panel about technology, a friend of mine asked whether the panelists were worried that more people from our generation weren't involved in hardware, soldering whatzits and making hobby computers.
One panelist (the only person on the panel that I remember was Bruce Perens, and it wasn't him) said that he had learned to fix the carburetor on his ancient pickup back in the Stone Age, and he was…
goodmath | September 12, 2006Several people in the geekout thread asked me to explain how a sliderule works, and I've been meaning to write a couple of article about manual computing devices. So I thought I'd do it. There's a nice slide-rule simulator at [Derek's Virtual Slide Rule Gallery][sr], which is what I used to generate the images in this article.
I know a lot of people think that the idea of learning to use something like a slide rule is insane in an age of computers and calculators, and that this is a silly thing to post about. But I really *love* slide rules, and not *just* because I'm a geek. Slide rules make…
oracknows | August 25, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
goodmath | August 22, 2006Everyone is scientific circles is abuzz with the big news: there's proof that dark matter exists! The paper from the scientists who made the discovered is [here][dark-matter-paper]; and a Sean Carroll (no relation) has [a very good explanation on his blog, Cosmic Variance][cv]. This discovery happens to work as a great example of just why good science needs good math.
As I always say, one of the ways to recognize a crackpot theory in physics is by the lack of math. For an example, you can look at the [electric universe][electric] folks. They have a theory, and they make predictions: but…
goodmath | August 14, 2006How can you talk about interesting numbers without bringing up π?
History
---------
The oldest value we know for π comes from the Babylonians. (Man, but those guys were impressive mathematicians; almost any time you look at the history of fundamental numbers and math, you find the Babylonians in the roots.) They tended to work in ratios, and the approximation that they used 25/8s (3.125), which is not a terribly bad approximation. Especially when you realize *when* they came up with this approximation: 1900BC!
The next best approximation came from Egypt, around the time of Pharaoh Amenemhat…
drorzel | August 9, 2006I had a bunch of students over for dinner last night, and while I was busy with that, stuff happened in the world. I hate that.
Of course, there's been a lot of energy expended on trivia like primary elections, but that's not what I'm talking about. The important news all has to do with physics.
First, via His Holiness, Peter Zoller has been awarded the Dirac Medal from the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics. It's not as big a deal as the Nobel Prize, or anything, but it's well-deserved recognition, both for Zoller and for the quantum computing sorts of topics he works…
goodmath | August 7, 2006Ω is my own personal favorite transcendental number. Ω isn't really a specific number, but rather a family of related numbers with bizzare properties. It's the one real transcendental number that I know of that comes from the theory of computation, that is important, and that expresses meaningful fundamental mathematical properties. It's also deeply non-computable; meaning that not only is it non-computable, but even computing meta-information about it is non-computable. And yet, it's *almost* computable. It's just all around awfully cool.
So. What is it Ω?
It's sometimes called the *halting…
scientificactivist | August 7, 2006On the weekend of July 28th-30th, about 150 NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) scientists from the UK and Europe (and a few from the US) gathered in Ambleside for the Sixth Annual Collaborative Computing Project for NMR (CCPN) Meeting. The topic of the meeting was "Efficient and Rapid Structure Determination by NMR", and it included presentations by twelve NMR scientists, a demonstration of the CCPN software, and about thirty research posters on various NMR talks.
Note: for more background on NMR, check out my previous post on the topic.
Biomolecular NMR is a rapidly growing field, one that…